by Anthology
The phone flew from her hand and she yanked the wheel hard right as the vehicle ran into the curb and shuddered to a stop. Abject terror shot through her as she realized she'd hit something...someone with her car.
"No no no no no no no," she pleaded under her breath. She slammed the car into park and shoved open the door, reciting every prayer she knew in her head as she stepped out and rushed toward the shape in the street.
"Please be a deer, please be a..."
She trailed off as she looked down, her worst fears confirmed.
Not a deer.
A man.
A very still and totally silent man.
Christ, what had she done?
Her legs buckled beneath her and she dropped to her knees next to the prone form, gravel digging into her skin through her tights as she did. Pain was good right now. Pain would ground her, keep her from flying off into blind panic.
"Please, oh God, please don’t be dead."
Her heart pounded wildly as she reached down and laid a hand on his cheek, flinching at the chill of his skin. It made sense, given bitter winter weather, but regardless, the sensation sent a wave of dread running through her.
She resisted the urge to pull her hand away and instead slid her fingers down to the side of his neck. For a full three seconds, she searched for a pulse, and dread became full-blown terror. But then, there it was. One beat. Two. Before she could process what was happening, a hand snaked out and closed over her wrist as the man sat up with a growl.
“What the hell?” he demanded, his tone a low rasp.
She struggled to find her own voice to respond as she stared at him in stunned silence. When he’d been prone, she hadn’t been able to see, his face had been cloaked in the shadow of the car. Now though, she could see him clearly by the streetlight. The close-cropped, dark hair, a perfect foil for his ice blue eyes. A slash of a mouth that looked hard and sensual at the same time. Shoulders so wide, he looked like he could’ve carried the world on them.
She pushed aside her inappropriate and disturbing reaction, focusing instead on the most pressing fact.
He wasn’t dead.
In fact, he looked very much alive.
The relief that coursed through her was all-consuming and she bit her lip hard to stop it from trembling before she spoke.
“I hit you with my c-car.” She swallowed the lump that had wedged itself in her throat. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you until it was too late. Are you all right?”
He never took his eyes off her face, and she found herself suddenly desperate for some space between them. She tugged her hand from his strong grip and pulled back a bit, making a show of looking him over for any obvious sign of injury.
“Maybe you should lay back down again. I’ll call the ambulance and they can check you out. I wasn’t going that fast, but I hit you full on and we need to make sure you aren’t seriously hurt. Could be that shock is keeping you from feeling anything right now.”
Although, he sure didn’t look like he was in shock. In fact, he looked intense…almost hyper-focused as his penetrating gaze drilled into her. She resisted the urge to wring her hands together under his scrutiny.
“Sir?” she murmured, only realizing after she’d spoken that she was leaning toward him now, hand extended.
To what? Comfort him? Check his pulse again? She hadn’t a clue and she snatched her hand back, fisting it at her side.
“I’m okay. Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He shook his head as if to clear it, his handsome face screwed up in confusion. “I don’t even know what happened. One second I was crossing the street, the next I was lying here with you above me. But now that you mention it, my arm is aching pretty bad.” He rolled his shoulder and winced.
Guilt rushed in, hard and fast. She’d been careless to the point of recklessness. It was only by the grace of God that this poor man was sitting before her, speaking now instead of on his way to the afterlife.
“Don’t apologize to me. It was my fault entirely,” she said. “I took my eyes off the road when I heard my phone ring. I never do that. I don’t know what I was thinking,” she murmured miserably.
The last part was a lie. She’d known exactly what had been on her mind, and it wasn’t driving. Now wasn’t the time to dwell though. She had to get this guy out of the cold and in front of a medical professional to make sure that her terrible mistake wouldn’t cause him long-term damage.
“Stay here for a second. I’m going to get my phone and call nine-one-one so the EMTs can check you out.”
She stood and scurried back to the car, leaning into the open driver’s side door to retrieve her cell phone. It had flown from her hand when the accident had occurred and it took half a minute of searching to finally find it on the floor.
She tapped the power button but the screen never came to life. She ran her finger over the jagged center and winced, realizing it had shattered.
Son of a…
Okay, so maybe he had a cell phone. Then again, if the impact had been enough to crack her phone, what were the odds of his—
“What’s going on?”
A silky baritone sounded directly over her shoulder and she jerked up so fast, she banged her head on the roof of the car.
She turned to find the man she’d run over standing just a foot away, staring down at her in the dim light of the street lamps.
She craned her neck to meet his gaze. Lord, he was big. Six four if he was an inch. He towered over her five foot nothing, and she couldn’t deny the sizzle of apprehension that ran through her. Hadn’t she seen a Dateline episode just last week where they did a report on some scam just like this? Was she about to be the victim of some heinous crime?
She clutched the phone more tightly, prepared to use it as a weapon if she needed to.
“You shouldn’t be standing up.” She cleared her throat nervously, shifting from foot to foot. “You could have some sort of spinal trauma or neck injury, and standing is only going to make it worse.”
“I’m freezing,” he muttered in a raspy voice. “I think my fingers are getting frostbitten out here or something because they feel stiff and strange.” He held up a hand and she gasped as she noted a river of blood dripping from the sleeve of his cable-knit sweater onto the pavement.
“Let me see,” she demanded, reaching out to grip his arm and examining it tersely. The sweater was torn and there was a nasty gash down the length of his forearm. In the relative darkness, it was impossible to tell exactly how deep it was, but she hoped he hadn’t nicked an artery. “Do you have a phone on you?”
“No. My truck broke down about two miles back and my phone was out of juice. I thought about knocking on some doors, but then I remembered passing a gas station a ways back, and figured I could make it without too much trouble.”
She vaguely remembered passing a truck with its hazards on, but had been to preoccupied to take much notice.
Which explained why he was out walking with so few layers on in this weather.
She released his arm and glanced at the front of her car. The hood had caved in like an accordion, undeniable proof that he’d taken the full brunt of the collision. If this was some trick, he’d committed to it to the point that he’d risked life and limb to pull it off.
She turned, grabbed her purse, and flipped on her hazard lights. There was no time to waste on her silly paranoia. She’d mowed a man down with her car and now he was bleeding. A lot. It was her responsibility to make it right.
“Come on. My house is right over there, if you can manage it.” She pointed to the cheerily lit cottage just fifty yards away. “We’ll get you warmed up and bandaged and then make some calls.”
She took a tentative step toward him and he seemed to sway on his feet.
“Okay. But, I’m feeling a little dizzy,” he confessed, his words running together as she wedged herself beneath his underarm, praying she could hold his weight if he collapsed.
Just a short walk. She’d pa
tch him up like new and hope that it wasn’t more serious than it looked.
And tomorrow, she’d have to take a serious look at her choices to this point, because her preoccupation with the dead?
Had nearly cost this poor man his life.
3
Cherry blossoms.
Christ almighty, why couldn’t she have smelled like anything else? Vanilla, coconut, hell, even honeysuckle would’ve been better than cherry blossoms.
He resisted the urge to bury his face in her hair, and kept his muscles as loose as possible.
You’re supposed to be injured, he reminded himself. It would only take one slipup to tickle her intuition and make her untrusting. She’d already had a moment of apprehension back at the car. He had scented it on her. Fear, sharp and metallic. Once she’d seen his injury though, she’d pushed aside her instinct to fear him and had come to his aid.
That part of being human, he didn’t miss. Empathy to the point of carelessness. As a nightwalker, instincts were everything. The difference between eternal life and damnation.
Although sometimes he wondered if those were one in the same…
“Just a little further,” she murmured, curling her arm around him more tightly as they stepped off the street and over a curb.
The move pressed her lush breasts against his side and he swallowed a groan. Maybe this was some cruel form of karma. The universe’s way of punishing him for deceiving her. He recalled the stricken expression on her face when she’d realized she’d hit him and barely repressed a shudder of self-disgust.
Just suck it up and get through it. The sooner he got the information he needed to call Irena off, the quicker he’d be out of her life.
“Usually I love the solitude of having a lot of land to myself,” she said, her breath coming in short pants now from the exertion of supporting his body weight. “But today I can’t help but wish I had some closer neighbors.”
Gabriel wished he could call it done then and there. Vampire hunters, by nature, were far more cautious than this slip of a woman. The fact that she was not only bringing him to her house but had also basically acknowledged that no one would hear her if she screamed made him question not only Irena’s read, but also his own initial suspicions about her all too clean file.
Zara Matheson was almost certainly exactly what she seemed to be. A sexy librarian with no social life who made a killer pumpkin pie.
It was only the memory of the photo in her file that stopped him from walking away. The steely resolve in those china blue eyes. The firmness of her stubborn little chin. A pain he knew all too well reflected on her face. The kind of pain that could make a person do strange things…things so out of character, even friends and loved ones would say they never saw it coming.
One hour. He’d give it one hour, and if he didn’t find anything damning, he’d call it quits.
He tried to block all his senses as they picked their way across a tidy yard and up the cobbled pathway to her door. If he could just get away from her scent and the warmth of those curves, maybe he could think straight.
She unlocked the heavy front door with her free hand and led him through, a tacit invitation without which he would’ve had no choice but to stand outside. It was one of the few bits of folklore that still held true. Lucky for his kind, they’d managed to find ways around most of the rest of their limitations after centuries of trial and error with various chemical compounds and herbal supplements. Not only had they evolved to enjoy other food along with their diet of blood, they could even season it with garlic and follow it with a refreshing glass of holy water outdoors on a cloudy afternoon.
Entering a human’s home without a freely given invitation, though?
No.
If they’d been anywhere else, he could use his powers to enthrall her and convince her to do just about anything. But here, on her turf, she was in control, even when she invited him in.
It was a hollow defense…a thin thread of right in a whole tapestry of wrongs he’d committed, but for some reason, it gave him comfort that he wasn’t a complete monster.
“Let’s get you straight into the bathroom and take a look at that arm so we can stop the bleeding.”
She flipped on the lights and led him down the narrow hallway and into a fussy powder room that was the size of a supply closet. The walls were covered in wallpaper dotted with tiny pink roses with little green leaves. The sink was a creamy porcelain pedestal, and on the corner rested a bowl of miniature, lavender soap cakes.
It looked more like the bathroom of an eighty-five-year-old granny than that of a vampire hunter.
She pulled away and gestured for him to sit on the closed seat of the toilet.
“Just give me a second to gather some supplies.”
He let his eyes drift shut for a moment as she pawed through the medicine cabinet, thinking it better if he didn’t watch her. Something about the way she moved…
“You should probably take off the sweater so I can clean it really well and see what we’re looking at,” she said, setting some gauze and scissors onto the sink.
He followed her directive without question, pulling his injured arm from its woolen sleeve gingerly, as if it hurt.
Truth of the matter was, it didn’t. Yes, he’d cut himself in the “accident”. And yes, he was bleeding. Quite a bit, too, he noted with a sense of satisfaction. But the pain was almost imperceptible, and he could staunch the bleeding—hell, he could heal the wound entirely—with just a thought.
Not until his Florence Nightingale had bandaged him up, though. He needed her feeling good and guilty so she would be more open to allowing him to stay for a while and get the information he’d come for.
He swallowed the rush of self-disgust and tossed his sweater onto the floor, leaving him with only a threadbare, skin tight t-shirt on.
Her soft intake of breath wasn’t lost on him, and he fought back the immediate swelling of his cock. She was human, after all, and he was a large, fit male who happened to have features pleasing to a woman. They’d been in a stressful situation together and the adrenaline was high. It didn’t mean she wanted him, per se. It just meant that she was a healthy female and her body reacted in a natural way.
If only he couldn’t scent the pheromones in the air.
For the second time since laying eyes on her, his fangs lengthened as straight-up lust and bloodlust coalesced into a writhing miasma of need and hunger.
He should’ve fed before coming to her.
He’d known it when he’d seen her photo. She would test his self-discipline, but some part of him had felt it would be unfair to put her through this little investigation without suffering some himself.
And he was suffering in spades.
She cleared her throat and bent before him to examine his arm more closely.
“Good. Looks like it’s already starting to slow.”
Her fingers were warm against his flesh, a much-needed reminder to begin calibrating his own body temperature to match hers. He cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner.
“You’re freezing,” she murmured softly. “How long were you out there working on your truck before you started walking?”
“About half an hour,” he replied, glad she’d supplied him with a feasible out so readily.
“Well, I promise to be quick and then we can get you in front of the fire.”
True to her word, she moved fast, but those five minutes felt like a lifetime. Her hands were like tiny brands as she cleaned the blood from his arm, sending excruciatingly erotic pulses through him with every touch. Her scent surrounded him, filling his head, making him want things he had no business wanting.
When it was finally over, she tapped his shoulder lightly and stepped back to admire her handiwork before meeting his eyes.
The room was silent for a long moment before she spoke again, her voice husky as she held his gaze. “You all right to walk?”
Her hand fluttered up to rest on her chest and he barely r
esisted the urge to reach out and replace it with his own. To feel her heart pounding, to test the silkiness of the exposed skin beneath her open collar.
He shifted where he sat in a vain attempt to take the pressure off his zipper and found himself wishing he could enthrall her for just long enough to make her button her dress shirt to the top and put on a necktie or something. At least then he wouldn’t have to be teased by that vee of cleavage anymore.
But the thought of a tie around her neck sent another bolt of lust through him as he imagined looping it around her wrists, tugging her onto all fours and—
“I’m fine,” he ground out. “Much better. Thanks for patching me up.”
“Let’s go have a seat by the fireplace and warm you up.” She waved for him to lead, but he gestured for her to step out ahead of him.
It was a mistake.
If she was dynamite from the side and the front, the back was C4-level shit. Her shoulders tapered to an impossibly narrow waist that led to curvy, feminine hips and an ass that made his hands itch to touch.
When they stepped into the cozy living room, she bent to pick up a remote that controlled the fireplace, and set it burning a cheery orange with the touch of a button. Then, she turned to face him and lifted a hand to her hair.
“Are you thirsty?”
If she only knew.
Eight years, one week, three days and fourteen hours. That’s how long it had been since he’d been inside a woman. It had been even longer since he’d drank from one.
At that moment, he felt every millisecond of every one of those days.
Because that pinup body was inches from his and those blue eyes stared out from that angel face, eyeing him like he was a big, fat goose on Christmas Day. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were a little glassy, and she was clearly overheated because she’d unbuttoned her suit jacket, revealing twin peaks beneath her white button-down shirt.
Fu-uck.
His already primed cock swelled to the point of pain as he tried to pull his gaze away from her, but couldn’t.
